As 2019 came to a close, offline and online events slowed down as many in the Neo community prepared to celebrate the holidays. Even so, there were noteworthy achievements made in the month of December.

Neo and TomoChain held its first joint meetup and workshop in Vietnam, following a partnership announcement a few weeks earlier. The event, titled “Embrace & Connect,” featured a presentation from Neo Global Development (NGD) director of ecosystem growth, John Wang, who also joined a panel comprised of Yuan Gao, NGD head of marketing, Kyn Chaturvedi, CBDO of TomoChain, and Trung Van Hoang, founder of KTS group. NGD engineer, Longfei Wang, later held a workshop where he discussed building Neo-based blockchain games.

On the development side, the NeoVM received significant improvements, including redesigned and simplified opcodes, and enhancements that speed up execution efficiency by more than 16x. In other items on the road to Neo3, a proposal for a new governance model was completed, whilst consensus was reached on a voting proposal for the new built-in Oracles.

Community development groups continued to deliver with NeoSPCC releasing an updated version of neofs-local, a private development environment for building and testing applications that use NeoFS. Coupled with the recently published NeoFS Proto library, developers now have all the tools they need to test the API and create Go applications with native support for NeoFS storage.

Another noteworthy release came from Alienworks, a new Neo community led by former NGD employee, Peter Lin, in the form of NeoNodes. NeoNodes is a network monitoring system that aims to provide developers with a picture of available RPC nodes in the Neo ecosystem, which can be used to remotely obtain data from the blockchain or to relay transactions.

The full Neo Global Monthly Report can be found below.

CORE DEVELOPMENT

CORE DEVELOPMENT

Overview

In December, we focused on storage refactoring on Neo to support the needs of different scenarios. Currently LevelDB and RocksDB are already supported and we are adding support for FASTER. At the same time, we have strengthened the security of the contract and increased the permission limit of contract invocation.

On NeoVM, we are redesigning the instruction set in order to enhance the functionality of contracts and reduce the excessive usage constraints of contracts. The variable slot and the object reference counter are added, for easy management of the object life cycle.

– Chuan Lu, NGD Protocol group leader

CORE DEVELOPMENT

Neo3

NEO LIBRARY

Added a new SYSCALl: System.Contract.CallEx, restrictions on the invoked contract.

Decoupled storage as an abstract storage layer, making LevelDB and RocksDB extension modules.

Updated the serialization method to support the latest NeoVM.

Added base64 in JsonSerializer to improve the compression rate and save storage space and bandwidth.

Added state in ExecutionContext for extension, and removed CallingScript in ExecutionContext.

NEO DEVPACK DOTNET

Replaced Travis with GitHub actions.

Adjusted the ABI naming format: camel name.

Updated to support latest Neo.

Added debug information.

Added FeatureAttribute to prevent mistakes with multiples smart contracts in one assembly.

Allowed neon to compile using the source files.

Allowed to compile big switch cases.

REORG & UPGRADE

Chose ‘N’ as the first letter of all address in Neo3.

Neo-cli and neo-gui were merged into a single solution.

The neo-plugins repository was renamed to neo-modules.

CORE DEVELOPMENT

Neo 2.X

NEO 2.X

Added Limits in MerkleBlockPayload.

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

Overview

In December, many developer communities focused on integrating Neo3 support into their projects. COZ finished preparing documentation for neo3-python, made network changes to neon-js to match the Neo3 network list, and began refactoring Neon Wallet. Similarly, neow3j made its Neo 3.x branch its default development branch, NeoResearch worked on adjusting NeoCompiler Eco to Neo3, and NEL made a range of updates to Teemo-NEO3.0.

In other Neo3 progress, NeoResearch also worked a new “Cancel Phase” for dBFT 3.0, which will be one of the core changes alongside a new governance system for consensus nodes.

NeoSPCC completed a large body of work in December, pushing out new releases for NeoFS, NeoFS CLI, NeoFS Proto, NeoFS DropIn, NeoFS HTTP, and NeoFS Local. NeoSPCC also cut a new release for NeoGO, which now fully supports dBFT consensus, making it the second consensus-ready node implementation for the Neo blockchain.

Other notable progress includes Neo NEXT adding a range a new features to its NEOLine mobile wallet, including a news section, application search features, and fingerprint / FaceID integration, and the release of NeoNodes by Alienworks.

Full details of community development progress in December can be found below.

NGD SEATTLE

Neo2.x

Continued work on updates to Neo Toolkit for .NET. Watch for the 1.0 release in January.

Neo3

Neo Toolkit for Neo3 will be launched in the new year.

Key updates have been made for the Visual DevTracker, Smart Contract Debugger and the Toolkit on Visual Studio Code Marketplace.

Made progress on refactor related to integrating neon-js v5.0.0 into Neon Wallet to support Neo3

NEORESEARCH

Neo2.x

Several updates were applied to NeoCompiler Eco and the server was upgraded to a more powerful infrastructure.

Conducted studies on mathematical and theoretical proofs for dBFT 2.0 and the use of State trees.

Neo3

Worked on adjusting NeoCompiler Eco to Neo3 and the possible integration with Neo3 Explorer Preview from COZ.

Worked on designing statistical tools for analysing pull requests with ANOVA using blocking factors, model validation, and automatic generation of comparison plots.

Worked on the design of a new tool, based on NeoCompiler Eco, for automatically feeding the statistical model with any configuration of a Neo network.

Worked on discussions and writings of more details for additional dBFT phase – “Cancel Phase” – which will be one of the core changes proposed for dBFT 3.0 together with a new governance, based on Game Theory concepts, for easily contributing as a consensus node.

Contributed to discussions on GitHub for achieving privacy on smart contracts, such as anonymous NEP-5 and the SciChain project.

Events & Partnerships

Participated in Brazilian forum on blockchain, which included a major development bank and social institutions. The importance of having a verifiable data structure, which is reliable against previously unknown bugs, while still maintaining fundamental immutability guarantees was discussed and highlighted.

Some Brazilian government entities indicated strong interest in Neo technology, due to its efficient node control via dBFT 2.0 consensus, especially when integrated via a hybrid permissioned public-access ledger, to a fully public ledger.

NEXT

NEOLine mobile app

(Android latest version 1.3.0, iOS latest version 1.5.1)

Added fingerprint recognition to Android

Added Face ID / Touch ID identity unlocking to iOS.

Added information columns, including Chinese newsletter, community section, English news, and Twitter section.

Increased the application section and added more dApps to the Neo series.

Increased the application search – convenient for users searching existing applications and to open other links.

Neo Interactive Tutorial

Typescript: Slightly delayed, expected to complete the script for first 2 lessons and go open-source.

Testing: It has been deployed on the server for joint debugging. A preview version will be launched in early January and internal testing will begin afterwards.

NGD SHANGHAI

NGD SHANGHAI

Overview

In December, we focused on optimizing performance and we are considering adding StateRoot to Neo to ensure state consistency. In terms of performance optimization, we have tested in different environments and found that block generation is still not very stable and is still being optimized continuously.

Another interesting area of progress was Neo-GUI, in which we held many discussions around its front-end technology stack and product positioning. We took steps to investigate different paths, and it’s now under development.

Approaching the end of the year, the NGD marketing team was busy with online activities such as Neo Live and holiday campaigns aiming to engage more projects in the ecosystem with the community. The Christmas campaign we ran on our official Twitter soon gained some popularity among the community. Looking back at 2019, we have been summarizing what we have achieved and what we could do better. Also, the team is busy preparing for some exciting activity lineups for early 2020, including details of the much anticipated Neo DevCon 2020. Stay tuned for another exciting year!

– Adam Yang, NGD Marketing content manager

MARKETING

Offline Events

21st

Neo and TomoChain jointly hosted a meetup & workshop titled “Embrace & Connect” in Hanoi, Vietnam. John Wang, director of EcoGrowth at NGD, gave an overview of the Neo ecosystem, followed by project leaders showcasing various dApps and games on the platform.

MARKETING

Online Events

0xGames

Sergei Kopov, founder of 0xGames, joined Neo Live on Telegram and introduced the Neo version of the 0xWarriors game.

Infographic

Neo published a Neo Insights infographic titled “The state of blockchain in China,” explaining how blockchain technology would solve social and economical issues in China and how local sectors are embracing the blockchain development strategy.

NeoLogin

NeoLogin co-founders, Thijs Maas and Albert Acebron, joined Neo Live on Telegram to introduce NeoLogin’s one-stop login solution for all Neo users to any game or dApp within the Neo ecosystem.